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Re:Working remotely is hard by bunderbunder on Sunday November 15, 2015 @09:18PM (#10572264)
I switched from remote back to in-person about 2 months ago, and to be honest I'd completely forgotten how much easier it is to get some things done in a co-located environment. There were a lot of great things about working from home, but getting things done at anything above a "banging out the actual code" scale was not one of them.

I wish I could take back all my prior invocations of the complaint that someone interrupting me for 15 seconds eats 15 minutes of my productivity. Not only have I come to recognize just how transparently self-centered that meme is (and I'm embarrassed that I couldn't see it before, but given all the other great things about working from home I suppose a little confirmation bias is understandable), I've also realized that there are really quite a few domains where premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Re:Working remotely is hard by will_pseudonym on Sunday November 15, 2015 @09:49PM (#10572355)
When I'm onsite with my team, it's so enjoyable because we can laugh and joke and mull over problems together. It's got a real sort of in the trenches feel to it. It's hard for me to think of those distractions as negative.

I think that the interruptions thing is definitely true, but the things that interrupt us are our devices, not our people. You can tell a colleague that you've got to get more uninterrupted time, but your device continually beckons.

Another thing that interrupts me is slow system access. I'm trying to develop on a test database that's abhorrently slow. Each time I'm forced to wait, I quickly pick up my phone, or load up a Hacker News tab.